"How in the world do you manage the hills?" It's the question anyone who bikes in San Francisco has to answer sooner or later - whether posed by a visiting relative or a native of the city whose hands are permanently attached to a steering wheel. Chicago has freezing winters, Austin, Texas, blazing summers, New York homicidal traffic; in our town, we have hills. For cyclists, the city's peaks are a source of both pleasure and dismay. Cruising down Fulton Street is as thrilling as downhill skiing. But when it's time to make the return trip, there's no chairlift available. What's a cyclist to do?

There are three basic approaches to this dilemma, not only marking profound philosophical differences in cycling strategy, but often charting a cyclist's path from casual commuter to bike addict.

Avoidance

"I avoid hills as much as possible," says Nancy Botkin, who describes herself as the physical opposite of Lance Armstrong. Like the bamboo tree that bends in the wind and so survives the storm, a large contingent of cyclists simply circle the hills, surviving to cycle another day. These are the cyclists you see standing on a corner, studying the color-coded street grades on their San Francisco bicycle maps (soothing white for a small hill to alarming orange for any slope over 18 percent). These are the cyclists who prefer detours to sweat. Says Botkin: "Over time, I realized that since biking was so much faster than walking or Muni, it didn't even matter if I went really far out of the way. And more time spent biking is more time enjoying life!"

And if you do run into a hill? That's when gears come in handy. Or if you're riding without gears, in a pinch you can always dismount and push your bike.

Ancestors of these San Francisco cyclists gave civilization the Wiggle, the celebrated route that twists and turns through Duboce Triangle and the Lower Haight to the Panhandle, connecting points southeast with points northwest. Cyclists of all abilities ride it daily. If Armstrong lived in San Francisco, even he would ride it. These cyclists are the guardians of an important piece of cycling wisdom: The most direct route is not always the best.

Acceptance

Eli Wadley, who began biking three years ago, has an unavoidable hill in his life - the one he lives on. "I tried all the different routes to figure out which was the least horrible," he says, describing the climb up to his home on 20th Street, between Sanchez and Noe streets. After seeing a unicyclist riding up a neighborhood hill, he pushed himself to bike a little farther up the slope each day. A triathlete friend advised him to zigzag up the steepest part, "which made a big difference," he says. Now he finds bicycling even the steepest part easier than pushing his bike. And he's enjoying the bragging rights: "You can point to a hill and say, 'I went up that.' " He admits that he plans his day so that he only makes the climb once, but adds, "Traffic scares me more than hills. Hills are not as hard as I thought ... it's actually fun." It's another epiphany on the way to bicycle enlightenment: There are worse things than hills.

Love

"I love hills," says Diane Serafini. "They focus your mind on the up, and the down is so much fun." She's the kind of cyclist who flourishes in our hilly terrain, the cyclist who actively seeks what many Wiggle cyclists regard as punishment.

"My work commute is totally flat now," says Maureen Devlin, with a touch of regret. So for fun she rides along Seventh Avenue and Laguna Honda Boulevard to Portola Street and then down the Clipper Street hill. "Up at the top I get a great view; I don't even pedal almost the rest of the way home."

Devlin was a natural for the Seven Hells of San Francisco, a ride organized by Frank Chan, a member of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. Chan sought out the steepest and longest hills the city has to offer, creating a torturous route that attracted about 40 intrepid hill-loving cyclists. "It's a novelty ride, a chance to have people cheering you as you go up," Chan explains. "In climbing the steepest slopes the city offers, cyclists overcome the mental block which makes a hill loom so large." Which brings us to our final bike koan: The more you bike, the smaller the hill becomes.

And if it's not small enough, you can always walk and push.

Resources

Join other cyclists on the coalition's recreational bike rides; see the ride calendar at www.sfbike.org/chain. Responsible Organized Mountain Pedalers ( www.romp.org) also offers two-wheeled tours of city peaks. Avoid the hills with the San Francisco Bike Map, a color-coded map of San Francisco's street grades, available in most bicycle shops or at www.sfbike.org/store_resources.

Bike About Town is presented by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, a 10,000-member nonprofit dedicated to creating safer streets and more livable communities by promoting the bicycle for everyday transportation. For more biking resources, go to www.sfbike.org.